There has always been a heavy presence of adventure games on the ZX81 and Spectrum market, though recently the standard of the best has improved fantastically with the launch of The Hobbit. For this reason, it is very important that it you want to market an adventure, that it must be very good to stand any chance of success. It is also important to use some if not all machine code and a 48K machine to make the possible permutations large enough to make the game interesting.

The plots in both Mines Of Saturn and Return To Earth are very predictable. Neither of them use any graphics at all in the games themselves whch seems a pity considering that you are dealing with a computer with excellent potential. They are both for 16K machines though only take up 7K out of the 9K available. The vocabulary is very small, as is the number of possibilities. It is very easy to get killed as you have to way at all to fight back. The sentence interpretation routine is very poor and slow - another thing that you should not get on the Spectrum. If you lose, then it is necessary to type GOTO 1 to re-start, surely a "Do you want another game?" routine wouldn't have strained the programmer too much.

Basically, the quality of this game does not even come up to that of the better ZX81 adventures. Definitely not one that I could recommend.